


long live the car crash hearts

by mondaycore



Series: the last of the real ones [7]
Category: Formula 1 RPF
Genre: Abuse, Alternate universe - Mafia, Angst, Character Study, Hopeful Ending, M/M, References to Depression, References to Suicide, Self-Esteem Issues, Sexual Content, Unhealthy Relationships
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-29
Updated: 2019-11-29
Packaged: 2021-02-25 21:51:11
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 4,039
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21605938
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mondaycore/pseuds/mondaycore
Summary: Pierre keeps his eyes fixed straight ahead. A dozen unblinking stares return his gaze.
Relationships: Max Verstappen/Alexander Albon, Pierre Gasly/Charles Leclerc, Pierre Gasly/Daniil Kvyat
Series: the last of the real ones [7]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1499777
Comments: 20
Kudos: 93





	1. fix me in forty-five

**Author's Note:**

> monday’s law: if an otherwise nice and wholesome character exists, they will get the shit kicked out of them physically and/or psychoemotionally. corollary: if there is even the slightest chance of rarepair happening, rarepair will happen.
> 
> please mind the tags up above. the max/alex is basically only implied, if that matters to anyone 
> 
> also, yes, fall out boy.

“Useless. Worthless.”

Pierre keeps his eyes fixed straight ahead. A dozen unblinking stares return his gaze.

The walls of Marko’s office are lined with portraits of all those who’d found favor in the eyes of the _ capo dei capi _ — or more accurately, it’s a shrine to the survivors, to those who’d churned through the slaughterhouse without burning out. Sebastian, of course, legend incarnate, and Daniel, still fondly beloved despite his defection. Max is there, ever the favorite son, and Alex too, already afforded the honor following several daring attacks on the other houses in the short time since his promotion.

Pierre is conspicuously missing.

“You had one job, Pierre. All you had to do was escort Alex and the shipment to the loading point, and you couldn’t even manage that,” Marko says, and the worst part of it is, he doesn’t even raise his voice above a conversational level. Not mad, not even disappointed.

The slap to the face, when it comes, still hurts much less than the utter lack of surprise in Marko’s voice.

Pierre keeps his face blank. Keeps looking determinedly forward. Christian, Marko’s ever-faithful _ sottocapo_, leans against the wall in the corner of the room with his arms crossed, wearing a mildly disinterested look on his face as if he’s watching a particularly mediocre play unfold on stage before him.

“Explain to me why you let the shipment be captured,” Marko says, talking loudly and slowly, as if to a child.

“Alex — he was hurt,” Pierre mumbles. “I turned around, I had to help him — ”

“Alex can take care of himself, which is more than we can say about _ you_,” Marko says_. _ “Your priority is protecting our contraband.”

“He was hurt badly, I couldn’t — ” 

Marko hits him again, hard enough that even Christian winces a little.

“Shut up,” Marko sneers. “I thought demoting you would have taught you a lesson, but clearly not. Fail us again, and I’ll have to reconsider whether you belong here at all.”

And there it is, the terminal threat. Pierre is only surprised it’d been so long in coming. 

Excommunication from the House of Marko means, of course, you vanish in the middle of the night, and they never find a body, and nobody, not even the police, asks any questions or investigates further. Pierre’s seen it happen enough times that he’s numb to it already — though hearing about Brendon, that’d hurt. They'd been friends, of a sort. He’d been there one day, and not the next, no portrait on the wall, no mention of his name anywhere, like he never even existed at all.

It should probably scare him, that Marko’s words don’t scare him more. But all he feels is hollow, and empty, and numb.

“I’m sorry,” Pierre says, and Marko raises his hand again. Pierre flinches, bracing for it.

“That’s enough, Marko,” Christian says, and whatever humiliating gratitude Pierre feels toward him is immediately crushed when he says, “he’s not worth it.”

Marko considers him for a beat, and lowers his hand. 

Pierre drops his gaze to the ground. A little thread of blood winds down his cheek, where Marko's ring had broken the skin.

“I’ll try harder, I’ll do better,” he mumbles, begging, pleading, even though he knows he sounds weak and whining, that it will only make things worse on him. But he would rather be beaten than suffer their apathy, the enormity of their indifference that reduces him down to less than nothing, that carves open a pit of shame and self-disgust in his stomach which threatens to consume him entirely.

Marko just sighs and looks at him, almost-pitying.

“Get the fuck out, Pierre.”

Pierre gets the fuck out.

\--

It’s not for lack of trying. It’s just, when he does try, it’s never _ enough_.

He just can’t _do _what the others do, put a gun in someone’s face and look them in the eyes and pull the trigger without his hands shaking, or tie someone up and cut them up until they spill their guts, metaphorically and oh-so-literally, without the bile rising in the back of his throat.

He wasn’t born into this world. Wasn’t raised by it, not in the way the others were. He’d been nothing more than a petty thief on the streets of Rouen, on his own since childhood, doing whatever he needed to do to survive, small-time hustles, back-alley tricks. He’d been jealous, of course, of the businesspeople in their nice suits, their stuck-up kids with their expensive clothes, hanging out at all the high-end clubs.

It's not even like he’d wanted that life. All he'd wanted was for them to look _at_ him without looking _ through _ him, sliding their eyes right past him, the beggar kid lurking in the shadows lesser even than the stray dogs that at least got their sympathetic touches and their spare scraps of food.

So he said yes to things he probably shouldn’t have agreed to, did things he probably shouldn’t have done, and one thing had led to another, and it’s like swimming in the ocean, right, easy to get swept out into open waters, impossible to find your way back to land, and the more you struggle, the tighter the sharks circle in around you.

He’s slipping a little further under, day by day, the water slowly creeping up, closing over his head. And yet, still he flails to stay afloat, even though he knows it’s a futile effort — and yet he cannot fathom why he doesn’t just let go, why he fears drowning in the abyssal dark more than he does being torn apart.

\--

It’s a mistake, trying to talk to Max.

“You were supposed to protect him,” Max growls, catching him by the arms and slamming him back against the wall hard enough that the windowpanes rattle. “What the fuck happened, Pierre?”

“Lewis came out of nowhere, I didn’t see him, I couldn’t stop him,” Pierre says, twisting pathetically, trying to get free. Max tightens his grip, hard enough to bruise. 

“_You nearly got him killed_,” he hisses.

“I went back, I let the shipment go, Max, I let it go, I turned around for him,” Pierre says, and he knows how gutless he sounds but he can’t get himself to stop, even though there’s no point in trying to explain himself because he knows Max won’t be convinced. His heart lurches against his ribs, his body still remembering the impact of the ambush. And it’s fire he sees, muzzle flash lighting up the night, the mortal panic flashing in Alex’s dark eyes, his clothes drenched in red, his skin slippery with it, the thick taste of copper coating the back of his throat, the acrid chemical burn of gasoline searing his sinuses. 

Max snarls in the back of his throat, enraged, and Pierre closes his eyes, unable to stand it. Max had never looked so angry on _ his _ behalf. Even when he’d had gotten captured and tortured and dumped back on the Scuderia’s doorstep, bleeding out, half-dead, Max had only ever looked annoyed at best.

Alex is something special to Max, and all Pierre had ever been is an inconvenience. Self-loathing rises in him, low and roiling. He’d been so fucking stupid for thinking they’d ever even been friends.

“I’m sorry,” he says, _ sorry, sorry, sorry_, the word having long since lost its meaning, tasting like ash on his tongue. Max, as if remembering himself, suddenly takes a deep breath and lets Pierre go. He jabs a finger into Pierre’s chest, keeping him transfixed to the wall like a butterfly to the corkboard of a collector’s box. 

“The only reason I’m not going to fucking kill you,” he says, very calmly and evenly, “is because he told me not to blame you.”

And despite his barely-restrained anger, there’s still an awestruck reverence in his voice that he is helpless to hide at the very thought of Alex. Once upon a time, Pierre might have teased him for that, but now the repulsive jealousy he feels, it only makes Pierre hate himself more. He wonders if Alex would be angry if he provoked Max into hurting him for real. To draw Max’s fury down upon him, anything but this cold dispassion — to offer up an apology in the only way that ever pleases anyone in this world, the grind of bone on bone, the bright hot salt of blood in his mouth. 

But Max just sneers and pushes him away, denying Pierre his selfish want for penance. He storms out of the room, leaving Pierre alone to wonder how much it _ would _take to get Alex to hate him if what he’d already done is not enough, because at least if Alex despises him, then he would know where they stand. He imagines what Alex might look like, contemptuous, furious, how cruel he would be and in what ways — all the things you have to know about a person before you can say that you really, truly know them.

\--

Charles calls him over for what Charles always calls him over for.

“Oh, _ chéri_, who did this to you?” he asks, four parts sincere and one part mocking as he always is, even here, even laying alone together.

“Marko. Max, _ ah,_” Pierre gasps as Charles runs probing fingers over the bruise purpling his cheek and the cut on his cheekbone, the fingerprint contusions on his biceps from Max’s hands around his arms. The dull sweet ache wells up, flaring into brightness and sharpness as Charles presses in, and Pierre swallows down his whimpers even as he writhes beneath Charles’ weight.

“No, come on, _ mon coeur_, I want to hear you,” Charles says. His pale eyes darken as Pierre obliges him with a broken whine when he digs his thumb into a welt high on Pierre’s ribs, a merited reminder of the night’s mission gone wrong. He says, easy as suggesting they take a walk in the park, “do you want me to take care of them for you?”

“_Dieu, _no, Charles,” Pierre says.

“Well, but how else will they learn not to touch my things,” Charles says, innocent as a saint, and Pierre _ burns _ with shame — at the thought that he’s so weak and useless that someone has to fight his battles for him, at the thought of being cared for enough that someone will.

“_Je vais bien_,” Pierre insists. _ I’m okay. _Or close enough to it, anyway. “Leave them alone.”

“If you insist,” Charles says, and grasps him by the arms where Max had grabbed him not even hours ago, and presses in close.

It’s always the same with Charles, intense in a way that’s borderline violent, like he sees little to no difference between a man he’s fucking and a man he intends to kill. Pierre doesn’t hold back his cries of pain anymore, he _ can’t_, and Charles leans in and drinks them all greedily from his mouth. This is why Charles is where he is, belonging in this world as a panther belongs in its fur, sleek and deadly, ruthless in this as he is in all things. And it hurts, _ it hurts_, and to counter it, Pierre claws his fingernails up his own thigh, hard enough to raise wheals. Just one of a thousand tricks he’s learned: divert the pain elsewhere, and it becomes tolerable.

When Charles is done with him, they lie next to each other in bed, not touching, not talking. Charles lights a Gitanes, and the room fills with the perfumed smell of dark tobacco.

“I don’t deserve you,” he says, blowing out a mouthful of smoke. 

“Why do you say that?” Pierre says, a heaving pit of panic opening in his chest. Charles says nothing for awhile, and Pierre lays there, cataloguing all his new injuries by sensation alone to calm himself down, trying not to drown in the silence.

“I never smoke unless you’re here, you know. I do all the things I shouldn’t do, with you. It’s bad for me, I shouldn’t get used to it,” he finally says. Charles means it about more than just the smoking, but Pierre’s brain is turning anxious figure-eights, not knowing what to _ do _with that knowledge, whether this means Charles still wants him here or not.

“It’s because I love you,” Pierre says, which seems like the safe response. Because it’s true, he _ does _ love Charles, a love like playing Russian roulette, like a mouse loves darting between the paws of a sleeping cat — exhilarating, and viscidly, abjectly terrifying.

“How much?” Charles asks, the barest hint of a smile in his voice. “This much?”

Charles turns toward him and holds his lit cigarette a scant few millimeters from Pierre’s eye, his hands unshaking. Pierre does everything in his power not to squirm away and nods, thinking, maybe he’d be a better shot, one-eyed.

“This much?” He pries Pierre’s mouth open with his free fingers and holds it over his tongue, close enough that Pierre can almost taste the cloying, nauseating flavor of the smoke. He’d never been particularly eloquent, either. Perhaps he’d be better off without words, since they always seem so ineffectual anyway. He nods again.

But he knows when Charles asks a question, he expects an answer, so Pierre shifts, tilting his head, baring the side of his neck to the man laying beside him.

“This much,” he says, and Charles takes one last drag and puts the cigarette out against Pierre’s skin, holding it there for several long seconds. The initial struck chord of pain flattens out into one sustained note, lingering even after he pulls it away.

“Ah, you spoil me, _ mon chéri_,” Charles says. He rolls over and traps Pierre in the cage of his braced arms and straddled legs, a switchblade of a smile flicking over his lips. He blazes with heat, and it makes Pierre think again of those dark winter nights of his childhood that he’d spent wandering the streets, afraid to sleep should he never wake up again. It’s another one of those things he’s learned, through the years: being lit on fire is a kindness when you are freezing to death.

\-- 

“_Боже, _you look like shit,” Daniil says by way of greeting as he pulls the door of his apartment open. Pierre starts to say something, an apology maybe for showing up in this state, but then the floor seems to tilt under him and he stumbles, reaching for the doorframe to brace himself but missing. Dany reaches out and catches him, easy as anything, and carries him to the couch and lays him down on his back, with his head resting on Dany’s leg.

Pierre closes his eyes and, for the first time today, for the first time in what feels like months, lets himself relax.

When he’d first been kicked back down the ladder and paired up with Dany, he’d expected, well, only what everyone else had prepared him to expect from a man they call “the Torpedo.” Some volatile Russian maniac, blunt as a two-by-four, with twitchy trigger fingers and an affinity for both attracting and generating disaster — all of which is true, yes, but as Pierre has since discovered, Dany is also much smarter than he looks, and terrifyingly perceptive.

He just _ gets _it. He just knows what Pierre needs and wants, somehow. And he never asks any questions, and he never makes Pierre explain himself, which Pierre is immensely grateful for. There’s a reason that it’s Dany he comes crawling to when he’s exhausted all his other options and needs to go to ground. 

Dany had been one of Marko’s near-casualties — had actually gone off the grid entirely for a year, missing presumed dead, until he’d showed back up one day like he’d never left at all, save for the gleam of vengeance in his eyes. Gunned down an entire squadron of Mercedes men his first week back on the streets. Pierre, he’s not doing such a good job redeeming himself. But they have grown to share a strange sort of understanding, the unspoken solidarity of two lone wolves cast out by the pack, running together in the wilderness.

When the room feels like it’s no longer spinning around him, Pierre opens his eyes again. An empty glass and a half-drunk bottle of vodka swims into view on the coffee table. The clock on the wall above the TV says it’s just past three in the morning.

“_Merde_. It's late. I’m sorry,” Pierre mumbles. He hadn't even realized.

“I wasn’t sleeping,” Dany says. He rubs a hand over his face tiredly. “Couldn’t sleep. I had to move them to a safehouse again, somewhere far from the city, until this Mercedes situation is taken care of. It’s hard, with Penelope being so young.”

He reaches forward and pours half a glass of that almighty Slavic analeptic. 

“Drink?”

Pierre shakes his head. If he puts anything into his body right now, he’ll vomit. Dany shrugs and takes the glass for himself, throwing half of it back in one go. Pierre winces on his behalf. 

“Christian told me what happened,” Dany says.

“There’s not much to tell,” Pierre says, dully. “I fucked up. Again.” 

“It didn’t sound like there was much you could have done.”

“There’s always more I could have done. Everyone else seems to think so.”

“Well, I’m not everyone else,” Dany declares, very matter-of-factly, and takes another draft of his drink. 

“Marko threatened to kill me because of it.”

Dany falls silent. Pierre watches the second hand on the ugly plastic wall clock go around and around and around. Finally, Dany leans forward and sets his empty-again glass on the table.

“Petya, if Marko killed you, it would be a mercy.”

“What do you mean?” Pierre asks, uncomprehending.

Dany looks down at him with an unreadable expression. 

“You were with him again. You smell like those disgusting French cigarettes.”

“Maybe,” Pierre says, trying and failing to keep the defensiveness out of his voice. He shifts around uncomfortably. “So?”

“I know what they call me, reckless, madman, but that one, the Red Prince, he’s _ crazy_. He did this, _не так ли_?” He reaches down and puts his hand over the burn on the side of Pierre’s neck, so close to the skin Pierre can almost feel the ghost of his touch. And then up to his face, Dany’s palm hovering just over his cheek, but not touching, never touching. “Marko did this.”

Then, damningly, he moves his hand over Pierre’s arm, even though Pierre is wearing long sleeves, and Dany shouldn’t be able to tell. But the look on his face must give him away, because Dany retracts his hand and sighs deeply.

“You let them do these things because you think it will make them happy, but it only tells them it’s okay to hurt you. But it’s better if they hurt you than if they don’t touch you at all, so you keep letting them do these things.” He slowly describes a circle in the air with a finger. “_Бесконечный. Нисходящий. _Endless. Descending. And there’s only one way out, Petya, and you are too scared to do it. Better let someone else do it for you. So, a mercy.”

Simple as that.

“You weren’t scared when he threatened to do it, were you?”

Pierre shakes his head and closes his eyes tightly, swallowing against the sticky lump in his throat, fighting down the tears that threaten to fall_. _ God, he’s so needy and pathetic, fucking useless, not even _ worth _ the attention he tries so desperately to catch and keep, and Dany’s completely right about him, that he’s better off dead after all —

“_Неправда_, little Petenka, I never said that,” Dany says, the most unbearably sad that Pierre has ever seen him — and Pierre lunges up and kisses him on the mouth, the panic of being caught out, the gut-churning contempt of his own vulnerability, and then under it all, the overwhelming relief that someone _ knows_, that someone _ gets it_. 

And Dany lets him, the only person in the world who allows Pierre to _ do _ instead of _ doing unto him_. Pierre whimpers _ how, Dany, how_, and Dany says, _ fight back, Petya, I know you can_, and he’s mumbling into Pierre’s mouth all these things Pierre doesn’t understand: _ хороший, храбрый, красивый _ — but the way Dany says the words, somehow, he doesn’t need to understand them to almost, _ almost _ believe them.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> nyet homo.
> 
> language note: petya/petenka are diminutives for “peter,” as you do not frequently encounter russians named “pierre.”


	2. the only thing i haven’t done yet is die

Pierre spends six days thinking about what Dany had said. In that time, his bruises curdle to a yellowish-green and the burn on his neck blisters, and then scabs over. But the words don’t leave him.

The accusation still stings like peroxide on a wound: _you let them do these things, because_. Then that slippery, melodic Russian phrase he’d said — whatever it had been, the never-ending, downward spiral. The soft warmth of another person’s mouth on his, the cold astringent taste of grain alcohol. The cowardice of living the way he does, that makes death by someone else’s hand a mercy. The eviscerating truth. 

_ Fight back, Petya_.

Because Dany just _ knows_.

When the sun sets on the seventh day, Pierre takes his gun, leaves his phone, and he goes. That night, the sky glows ochre, smudged with smoke.

\--

The morning after, Pierre kicks the door to Marko’s office open and is coldly gratified to see the identical looks of confusion and shock on Marko and Christian’s faces. He throws a set of keys down on Marko’s desk.

“These are the keys to a truck parked outside with the shipment we lost last week to Mercedes, plus some interest,” he says. “But believe me, they lost much more than that last night for what they did to us. To Alex.”

Christian looks between Marko and the keys and Pierre, like he cannot make a logical connection between the three things.

“What the hell did you do?” he asks.

“Fought back,” Pierre says, and can’t help the smile that creeps across his lips, a private joke shared only with himself. Christian and Marko both look uncertain now, borderline concerned. Pierre wonders exactly how deranged he must look to inspire that sort of reaction, because he certainly _feels_ insane. Like he could burn this entire city down, if only he could find a book of matches and some accelerant.

This is how it's like to be a shark, he thinks. It's freeing, and a little terrifying. 

Christian and Marko both seem to have nothing more to say to him, so Pierre turns around and leaves.

\--

Dany doesn’t have to ask what he’s done.

“_Умрешь — начнешь опять сначала_,” he says simply, the minute he opens the door and sees Pierre standing there again, still stinking of gasoline and ash, the blood still slick and shining on his hands, still bright on his clothes, not yet dried to rust-brown. “You die, you are reborn, you start anew.”

The rest of it, Dany doesn’t need words for. His hands and his mouth are good enough. He just _ knows _ like he always does, what he does and does not need to do, what he does and does not need to say.

“How did you know?” Pierre asks, afterward. "How do you just … get it?"

It has to be some kind of divine ability, that he can just look at Pierre and know him the way he does. To look at a pile of miserable scrap and pull out the one thing worth keeping, with such a deft and gentle touch.

“By the time Marko exiled me, I also — ” Dany says. He frowns and shakes his head. “Never mind. You know because you survive it. You’ll get it too, one day, Petya.”

One day. It's vague enough to be a nice promise. Whenever that day is, it still feels a long way off, and for now, he’s exhausted down to his bones. He'll be expected to do it again, what he'd done last night. Do it again and again and again without losing himself to it. But still — one day. It sounds nice, knowing that he’ll eventually be through it all and can understand it the way Dany seems to. Sounds like a day worth waiting for, he thinks, as he starts the long, slow descent into sleep.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i had a great deal of fun writing dany, because he’s a blank slate to me. his characterization ended up as kind of an average of all the russians i’ve ever met, which, if you are russian, ought to be taken as a compliment.
> 
> another language note: “you die, you are reborn, you start again” (_умрешь — начнешь опять сначала_) is a (my) rough translation of a line from a poem by alexander blok, the actual meaning of which is far bleaker than how it’s used here in context because Russian Nihilism — but we’re ignoring that for the sake of thematics and narrative. ya can’t take me alive, coppers!
> 
> despite what the pretentious quoting of poetry may suggest, i’m actually only the bare minimum of conversationally fluent in the language, so someone less Amerikanets and Dumb than me, please let me know if any of it is incorrect, because the only thing i will insist upon in my fic is linguistic accuracy (BIG shoutout to [Crow_Dust](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Crow_Dust/pseuds/Crow_Dust) for the language help!!! it was really helpful and very appreciated!).
> 
> the usual: this is fiction of my own creation. please do not involve the real world or real people in this, and please don’t link this fic out to other public platforms or social media. thanks as always to y’all amazing readers, and i hope you enjoyed this!

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [I Hope I Can Say What I Never Did](https://archiveofourown.org/works/22551187) by [BigBadFIA](https://archiveofourown.org/users/BigBadFIA/pseuds/BigBadFIA)


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